Trump’s Son-In-Law Opens Up About How He Helped His Father-In-Law Win

Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President-elect Donald Trump, has opened up to Forbes magazine regarding a wide variety of issues surrounding himself and his father-in-law.

In the interview, which was published online Tuesday, he denied having anything to do with pushing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie out of the Trump transition team, as some have speculated. Christie was involved in the prosecution of Kushner’s father on tax evasion and other charges back in 2005 when Christie was a U.S. attorney.

“Six months ago Governor Christie and I decided this election was much bigger than any differences we may have had in the past, and we worked very well together,” he said. “The media has speculated on a lot of different things, and since I don’t talk to the press, they go as they go, but I was not behind pushing out him or his people.”

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Forbes quotes a pair of titans of the tech industry who were impressed with how Kushner operated, essentially running something akin to a small startup operation.

“It’s hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared’s role in the campaign,” said billionaire Peter Thiel, the only significant Silicon Valley figure to publicly back Trump. “If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer.”

“Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election,” added Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, who helped design the technology system for Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources.”

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Many have pointed to Kushner’s presence as one of calming and reassurance in the Trump campaign.

“People were being told in Washington that if they did any work for the Trump campaign, they would never be able to work in Republican politics again,” he said. “I hired a great tax-policy expert who joined under two conditions: We couldn’t tell anybody he worked for the campaign, and he was going to charge us double.”

While Trump is well-known for his presence on Twitter, he is otherwise a technological novice. Kushner was able to leverage his business savvy and relationships to bring the campaign into the digital age.

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“I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff,” Kushner said. “They gave me their subcontractors.”

Kushner said that despite having nowhere near the financial resources that Clinton had, it was the Trump campaign’s ability to maximize the value of every employee and campaign dollar it had that carried the day.

“Our best people were mostly the ones who volunteered for me pro bono,” Kushner said. “People from the business world, people from nontraditional backgrounds.”

“We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best [return on investment] for the electoral vote,” Kushner said, referencing Michael Lewis’ best-selling book about Oakland A’s executive Billy Beane’s method of operation.

“I asked, How can we get Trump’s message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?”

Kushner said one of the keys to making this approach work was being willing to try unorthodox methods and be willing to change course in a hurry if they did not work.

“We weren’t afraid to make changes. We weren’t afraid to fail. We tried to do things very cheaply, very quickly. And if it wasn’t working, we would kill it quickly,” Kushner said. “It meant making quick decisions, fixing things that were broken and scaling things that worked.”

The data operation was eventually crafted to scientific perfection and it became a blunt force weapon leading Trump to victory.

“[Kushner] put all the different pieces together,” said Brad Parscale, digital director for the Trump campaign and president of Giles-Parscale.

“And what’s funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn’t pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well,” he said.